Full circle?

The past year will go down in the annals of history as another year of the ongoing global refugee crisis. Barely a quarter of a century ago, people were fleeing from the Baltic part of the Iron Curtain. The symbolic statue Quo Vadis, sculpted by the Czech artist David Černý, was erected in 2001 on the premises of the German Embassy in Prague to commemorate the expats.

A few years later, the sculpture had to be pulled 15 m forward to make it more visible and accessible because of the great trees that started to overshadow it.

Helmut Elfenkamper, then the German Ambassador to Prague, mentioned in an interview to the Czech Radio, "In the late summer and early fall of 1989, when the movement of Germans from the GDR started into different German embassies in Central and Eastern Europe, the group here was the biggest one – it grew to 4,000 people at the end of September ‘89, until they could freely travel to West Germany […]. And many, many of these cars were left behind by our fellow countrymen. And it symbolises this move, which was the beginning of the end of the communism in Europe."

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